What is the difference between children and childNodes in JavaScript?

Understand that .children is a property of an Element. 1 Only Elements have .children, and these children are all of type Element. 2

However, .childNodes is a property of Node. .childNodes can contain any node. 3

A concrete example would be:

let el = document.createElement("div");
el.textContent = "foo";

el.childNodes.length === 1; // Contains a Text node child.
el.children.length === 0;   // No Element children.

Most of the time, you want to use .children because generally you don’t want to loop over Text or Comment nodes in your DOM manipulation.

If you do want to manipulate Text nodes, you probably want .textContent instead. 4


1. Technically, it is an attribute of ParentNode, a mixin included by Element.
2. They are all elements because .children is a HTMLCollection, which can only contain elements.
3. Similarly, .childNodes can hold any node because it is a NodeList.
4. Or .innerText. See the differences here or here.

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